


Invisible Cars

by aderyn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Challenge Response, Episode: s01e01 A Study in Pink, Hurt/Comfort, Post Reichenbach, Reunion, and protozoa, letswritesherlock, taxicab confessions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-13
Updated: 2013-06-13
Packaged: 2017-12-14 18:07:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/839813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>We spend so much time, John dreams, moving from one place to another, unseen.  It’s like a confessional, this, a neither-here-nor-there,not travel but conveyance; yes, transport, the body, bodies, the place where exhalations blend and you might say any number of things.  </p>
<p>Six cities. Six cabs. One story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Invisible Cars

**Author's Note:**

> For [The Let’s Write Sherlock First Challenge](http://letswritesherlock.tumblr.com/post/52214431467/its-an-experiment-we-were-inspired-by-the), taxi trope (s).

“ _Everything reverberates and resonates, forming echoes of ideas, conversations, and stray thoughts that recur like musical motifs refracted and reflected in an infinite number of variations throughout the world at different places in space and time.”—E. Tucan on Jim Jarmusch_

****

**_London, 2011_ **

Sherlock’s mother never loved him best, but for one time. 

John learns this after a five-day murder bender, when Sherlock starts to see patterns on every flat surface along the radius they’ve been pacing for hours.

“Uh,” John says, as Sherlock notes another whorl, a _fleur-de-lis_ , some forms that don’t tend to exist externally, the folds of the cerebral cortex, (much adored) and projected like film.

“Look at that,” Sherlock says, finger-frames a storefront with amoebic and peniculid shapes morphing and skittering over its display window. “Remarkable.”

John flags the nearest cab, flings open the door, and shoves Sherlock into it. It isn’t all that difficult.

“What are you doing?”

“Isn’t that obvious? Taking you home.”

“I don’t need to be taken home.”

“You’re seeing protozoans,” John says, “that aren’t there. Classic sleep deprivation. The case can wait.”

“I always see things that _other people_ think aren’t there. What’s the difference?” 

“Just go with it,” says John, pushes him flat.

Sherlock's lids drop, skip as he slips, quick, between littoral and profundal.

“She forgave me,” he mutters, "my mother." Something about Mycroft and death and trespasses.

In a minute he’s out against the window, flush to the city he loves as it rolls past, fogging the glass with his breath.

**_London, 2012_ **

John’s breathing goes ragged when he drops.

Sherlock nearly unhinges the jaw of the pusher who managed to get blindside and punch John in the kidney, hands the sorry shit off to Lestrade’s furious face so he can press a palm to the slice of lumbar below John’s rucked-up jacket. The larger waste of protoplasm they’re after is in the wind. They’re not going to catch him.

“It’s all right, Sherlock; I’m OK. Might be pissing a little blood tomorrow; that’s all.”

Sherlock hands him into the cab, settles him the way he does an experiment, delicate, adjusting the oculars.

John may or may not tip over then into Sherlock’s lap, boneless, feel femur hard through the thin wool of his trousers.

_Jesus Christ Watson_ , he hears his insanest army mate say, _you’ve got your head in a madman’s lap and you’re in maybe the fifth worst pain of your life and you’re happier than you’ve ever been; who’s the mad bastard now?_

Later when he’s breathing through it on the sofa, eyeball-tracing the wallpaper for distraction, Sherlock slips from the kitchen with a plate of orange wedges and mug of something that reeks of terpenes and sage. He's barefoot, whip-lick bruise over his left eye, hairs staticked to lashes.

“Would it help if I told you about an old case?”

“It does, usually.”

Something cold on his face.  A settling over like cloud.

Words moving behind his eyelids, a skitter, a glide.

Too transparent to pass into memory.

**_Bruges, 2013_ **

The city is grey and full of ghost-taxis. Ghost-pigeons in the squares and ghosts pissing into canals.

Sherlock leaks darkening blood onto the upholstery. Wound perilously close to the inguinal ligament, the twinning of the femoral vein and artery. Trouble. The driver starts to shout at him and stops when Sherlock tells him, in near-perfect West Flemish dialect, that he’d do better to keep a closer eye on his father-in-law’s banking practices.  

“Hospital?” he asks in English. A ruby signet gleams on his hand.

“Hotel,” Sherlock manages.

Nucleus, he thinks. A perfect bullet hole in the roughed glass of a window. Astonishment, an alien thing.

The pain fogs his vision and puts a filament of light there, draws saccharides and ciliates from his brain, fuzzes the wires to water.

“When we get back home,” he whispers to the stream.

Ghost-Sherlock climbs the stairs and sees ghost-John’s startled look, the one that goes A&E right quick.

“Oh for … Sherlock, not again …where’re you hurt?”

John’s hands. His blood. Their hands.

“You won’t die,” John says, puts his mouth over the wound, seals it with his breath.

A Mycroft minion named Elise finds Sherlock in the hotel three days later, badly patched, raging temperature, speaking in fingers and flagella.

**_London, 2013_ **

Falling asleep alone in the back of a cab is an indignity he'd rather have been spared. He smells like the clinic. The lilac soap and menthol of the new grandmother they sent to A& E today with probable congestive heart failure. Death. The things he doesn’t smell like: Sherlock’s secret smoke, Sherlock’s acetones and aldehydes, Sherlock’s soft coffee and tea-scented breath, Sherlock’s resins and rose wax and page dust. Alley-standing water. Faint gun-ammonia. Peril.

Sherlock’s voice in his ear, describing the way the hippocampi of London cab drivers expand with the Knowledge, the cabbie nodding in irritation or pride it’s hard to say.

“You alright, mate?” the driver asks, his accent untraceable, mixed. He's got a lunate scar on his right hand and an eye twitch and Sherlock would know why.

Sherlock saying, _you like stories John_.

_You’re turning into a decent writer, even._

A blink. A warm flicker between them, surface tension, a ripple.

We spend so much time, John dreams, moving from one place to another, unseen. It’s like a confessional, this, a neither-here-nor-there, not travel but conveyance; yes, transport, the body, bodies, the place where exhalations blend and you might say any number of things. Trembling pellicle keeping the city just there, moving through it, holding us at the center.

So much we don’t see.

_They never loved me, my parents,_ Sherlock mumbled once, the city slipping by in the stream. _I suppose they tried._

John dreams in his invisible vehicle and when he climbs the seventeen steps invisible Sherlock is there, waiting for him.

_John!_

John goes to him a little too quickly, the lonely upholstery on him stifling and sad, puts a hand right through Sherlock’s  invisible body, feels Sherlock’s fingers on his stinging face.

**_Paris, 2014_ **

Montmartre. Sky mauve. Dawn. So close.

Once after a terrible case (ego-bruised, ink-eyed, simmering the whole ride home) John slammed the glossy door of the TX4 behind them and pointed the first light out to him as if that made it all right.

“Look at that,” John said as though they’d won, “ice crystals.”

The cirrus over Marylebone made him stop, quieted the biochemistry as John’s hand on his arm.

They went upstairs and clicked the kettle on and John put his gun down next to the sugar bowl and squeezed Sherlock’s clavicle and said, _ah, shit, how in the bloody hell am I going to write this one up_ and a bolt of something Sherlock hadn’t felt since he was a boy went through him so hard that he saw his own heartbeat, right there, synaesthetic, scarlet, leaping between them on the table; heart, eukaryote, engine, the substance of life.

He didn’t know what it meant then. 

The sun’s coming up. The taxi idles in the steep street, in the rain shadow of the _Sacré-Coeur._

__"Où_ vou_ _lez-vous aller?"_ the driver might be asking him. (Or he might be saying something far less polite.)

Sherlock’s eyes fog fresh-to-salt. His tongue tastes of other places.

“Home,” he says.

**_London, 2015_ **

The cab’s taking them anywhere, somewhere, back to Baker if Sherlock has a choice.

“My mother,” he says, “loved me best when she thought she was dying, and I told her she wasn’t.”

“Sherlock,” John says.

“I never told you that story. I never finished.”

“Not now.”

“I never…”

_She forgave me._

John’s breathing beside him, quick and steady and true.

He’s been back a month and London is full of life, just teeming with it green and gathering, _paramecia_ clustering overhead as though the plane trees were water; they might as well be.

Their transport, hydrodynamic; slow, slow.

John’s hand clenches, twitches, takes hold of Sherlock at the radial notch.

“Let me tell you a story John,” Sherlock says.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [ Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102536/).  
> [Cirrus at dawn](http://photo.accuweather.com/photogallery/details/photo/151199/Vivid+Cirrus+Clouded+Dawn)  
> [Paramecium caudatum](http://protist.i.hosei.ac.jp/pdb/images/ciliophora/paramecium/caudatum/intactcells/sp_10.html)


End file.
